A Public Funded "Microsoft Shop?" 490
An anonymous reader writes "I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: '(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop and when talking to staff / customers we are to support this strategy. I no longer want to see comments promoting other Operating Systems.' We have also been told to remove Firefox found on anyone's computer unless they have specific authorisation from management to have it installed under special circumstances. Now, I could somewhat understand this if I was working in a company that sold and promoted the use of Microsoft software for financial gain, but I work in the publicly / government funded health system. Several of the IT big-wigs at the DHB are seemingly blindly pro-Microsoft and seem all too quick to shrug off other, perhaps more efficient alternatives. As a taxpayer, I want nothing more than to see our health systems improve and run more efficiently. I am not foolish enough to say all our problems would be solved overnight by changing away from Microsoft's infrastructure, but I am convinced that if we took less than half the money we spend on licensing Microsoft's software alone and invested that in training users for an open source system, we would be far better off in the long run. I would very much like to hear Slashdot's ideas / opinions on this 'Strategic Direction' and the silencing of our technical opinions."
Re:Guess what (Score:4, Informative)
Re:hmm... (Score:2, Informative)
http://www.googlefight.com/index.php?lang=en_GB&word1=Taliban+&word2=Amish [googlefight.com]
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
Precisely what I'm moving towards. We'll probably have Exchange for some time to come, and that means Active Directory and DCs, but our file servers are all Samba running as member servers. Maybe someday Samba 4 will allow me to migrate the DCs away from Server 2003, but it will have to be able to prop up an Exchange 2003 server. The point in my shop is not to get rid of Microsoft because I'm an MS hater (though I sure ain't their biggest fan), it's simple economics. Their licenses are too friggin' expensive. I saved the organization several thousand dollars by going to Linux file server.
Re:hmm... (Score:2, Informative)
Once your organization gets on the Exchange bandwagon, you are utterly screwed. You will be forced to upgrade every time Microsoft decides they want to print more money. Good luck trying to migrate away.
Re:hmm... (Score:2, Informative)
Well, it looks like they're pretty much right.
Re:hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Everyone call them and complain! (Score:1, Informative)
I work at a public hospital in the computer / technical department and (amongst others) was recently outraged by an email that was sent around our department: '(XXXX) District Health Board — Information Services is strategically a Microsoft shop
Seriously, the only way anything ever gets done in this world is by naming and shaming:
Canterbury District Health Board
Information Services, Level 2, H Block
The Princess Margaret Hospital
Cashmere Road, Cashmere
Christchurch, New Zealand
Phone: +64 33 640380
Web: http://www.cdhb.govt.nz/contact.htm
As well as the Hospital Advisory Committee:
Web: http://www.cdhb.govt.nz/aboutus/management.htm
And the douchebag responsible for this mess is:
Michele Hider: michele.hider@cdhb.govt.nz
Re:hmm... (Score:5, Informative)
There's a reason for professional support services in the Linux sector. That can buy you back-porting, bug fixes, a whole host of other services that allow an organization to standardize on a single linux distribution for years. No sane company using Linux to their benefit is using "the flavor of the month". They weigh their needs, their budget, the pros and cons of each distribution that meets their criteria, pick a version and test rigorously. Then you don't fuck with it or upgrade for a few years.
Linux can only be successful in an organization that is open to change and this is very much culture dependent. Your example of tools that are put together hodge-podge that nobody knows about happens plenty in Windows also. The most egregious example of this is managers who think they can write VB applications in Microsoft Office. They can bastardize code and make something work on their computer, but the code is often so poorly written that it won't work across MS Office versions and crashes on the next upgrade.
Bad practices aren't limited to any one operating system.
Re:Take it to the board (Score:1, Informative)
New Zealand, which it sounds like the OP might be in, has had a number of controversies with this recently. And the end result has been that basically, if you're employed in the public sector, making a public submission to a select committee (or similar) is likely to cost you your job.
It's something complicated, like while as a citizen, you're free to engage in politics, but as a public sector employee, you mustn't appear to be in any way partisan, as you're required to implement whatever the decision makers instruct you to, and they must have faith in your ability to do so. Being politicians, the concept of "professionalism" is clearly alien to them.
It's kind of ridiculous, and hopefully it will change, but we have a fairly large chunk of the population who are effectively barred from engaging in political debate (ironically, the chunk that is often most knowledgeable about that area).
Re:hmm... (Score:1, Informative)
Hold on there. I am one of the hospital IT guys you're talking about. It has less to do with desire, and much more to do with supportability and the lives of the patients we care for.
There are several best-of-breed products out there for hospitals, such as McKesson Horizon Patient Folders, Horizon Medical Imaging, Horizon Emergency Care, and a few others that DO NOT have support for any other browser than IE. Installing Firefox or other alternative browsers can result in programs that are required for our staff to not work.
This is a serious risk, not only for our ability as an IT department to support the software, but it can even impact patient care directly! Nobody wants to see a patient suffer because you can't get the order for their pain meds to the pharmacy in a timely manner. Nobody wants to watch their doctor/nurse flail around with the computer they are documenting your care on. No end user wants to have to call IT every time they upgrade a non-standard browser and need to reset the default browser back to IE.
Locking down systems to a single configuration that simply works with the software they use is not draconian, it literally is a life-saving measure.
Of course, this applies more to patient care areas, and less to administrative functions - but the principle is applicable to both. IT departments at hospitals, like most other businesses are an expense and often support resources are outsourced, meaning there's nobody there to just "run down" and fix a system that some user installed their preferred browser on when it breaks things like their reporting tools.
I agree that MS is not really the best for all cases, but you're leaning too hard the other way, given the current state of development in the Healthcare industry.
From the IT Guy (Score:1, Informative)
Hold on there. I am one of the hospital IT guys you're talking about. It has less to do with desire, and much more to do with supportability and the lives of the patients we care for.
There are several best-of-breed products out there for hospitals, such as McKesson Horizon Patient Folders, Horizon Medical Imaging, Horizon Emergency Care, and a few others that DO NOT have support for any other browser than IE. Installing Firefox or other alternative browsers can result in programs that are required for our staff to not work.
This is a serious risk, not only for our ability as an IT department to support the software, but it can even impact patient care directly! Nobody wants to see a patient suffer because you can't get the order for their pain meds to the pharmacy in a timely manner. Nobody wants to watch their doctor/nurse flail around with the computer they are documenting your care on. No end user wants to have to call IT every time they upgrade a non-standard browser and need to reset the default browser back to IE.
Locking down systems to a single configuration that simply works with the software they use is not draconian, it literally is a life-saving measure.
Of course, this applies more to patient care areas, and less to administrative functions - but the principle is applicable to both. IT departments at hospitals, like most other businesses are an expense and often support resources are outsourced, meaning there's nobody there to just "run down" and fix a system that some user installed their preferred browser on when it breaks things like their reporting tools.
I agree that MS is not really the best for all cases, but you're leaning too hard the other way, given the current state of development in the Healthcare industry. ...and stop deleting my posts please. Posting anon is because I can't reveal my employer.
Re:hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:hmm... (Score:3, Informative)
You do. They're called elections.
Re:This web thing. (Score:1, Informative)
You need browser add-ons to correctly run your "critical" applications?
I don't use Firefox except in dire emergencies, but I get the impression that you can't restrict the add-ons that your users apply. It's not so much that the add-ons are necessary, but more unavoidable, and then people are calling the help desk and complaining about their crashing browser. Users regularly do not equate a particular action (installing CrashFest2009) with unexpected results.
Additionally, my opinion of Firefox is that it's basically unusable without a number of extensions (the exact selection depends on the user). Extension-free Firefox is a constant irritation. But how does an IT team deploy and control Firefox with only a few quality extensions and no opportunity to install the crappy ones?
Re:This web thing. (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Missed the point (Score:3, Informative)
The registry, which you shouldn't even have to touch anymore, seems obtuse until you start looking at some of the horrendous conf files scattered across the linux file system.
Given that each conf file generally comes with comments (more than you can say for the Registry), and is easily and trivially searchable (it's just text, and much quicker to run a fulltext search on than the Registry), I don't see what your problem is.
I'm not going to say that every conf file is perfect, and it's possible I just don't know, but...
There's a reason they're plaintext, and there's a reason that's better. I can write a sed script to edit a config file, I can do it quickly, and I can then distribute that to however many Linux machines I have. I can also write a script to generate a conf file, and build that into my deploy script. I can back up any particular config file, or the entire /etc hierarchy, using standard backup tools, because they're just files -- I can even stick them into version control.
I'm sure Windows can do some of that, but think about it. Does your server configuration fit in version control? Can you check out a copy of your application and, with a single command, bring up and configure a VPS to run it? Can you develop that script in less than a day, let alone the few hours it takes me?
Windows is probably easier to admin at a small scale, on the order of a fileserver here, a printserver there -- but then, at that scale, you set up Linux once and it pretty much just runs, which is why you can buy NAS devices which do all that for you. At a large scale, certainly once you get to thousands of boxes, I think any Unix has advantages over Windows, and you can see it in real-world TCO studies.